IRON MAN 2

Consensus among the posse is for Iron Man the first. I didn’t see it. Amy piles her gummy bears on top of her popcorn, the better not to fuss with a candy wrapper in the dark. Alex told me, in a recent dream: “Relax, it’s a witty city.” And Ben and I once went to a masquerade party wearing costumes involving click-on lights hung over our chests, the insignia of our made-up cult. But anything’s made-up until you sacrifice for real.

I could write a book. Yet it’s tempting, too, to leave this dense fable un-parsed, blockbuster sequel obsessed with media overload, techno-fantasy haunted by late-capitalist sins—check the Giacometti, here seeming a much-flayed Golem striding forth for the final time. Iron Man’s long-dead dad talks to him from, where else, a movie screen, to tell him a city is an atom is a machine is a heart. He drinks chlorophyll, essence of plant, to keep his cyborg-body alive, and the final showdown unfolds beside an edenic little waterfall-and-stream—an artificial one, however, created inside a dome that wears a real corporate logo, and the logo reads Oracle. So who is the Iron Man? Says Pinchbeck, “Traditionally, the evolution from ordinary human state to shaman is marked by a series of visions and dreams of the novice being killed, dismembered, eaten, regurgitated, and put back together by the spirits. His or her bones are replaced with quartz crystals, precious metals, or similar magical substances. For instance, in Borneo, according to Eliade, the spirits of past shamans come to the initiate, they ‘cut his head open, take out his brains, wash and restore them…insert gold dust into his eyes to give him keenness and strength of sight powerful enough to see the soul wherever it may have wandered; they plant barbed hooks on the tops of his fingers to enable him to seize the soul and hold it fast; and lastly they pierce his heart with an arrow to make him tender-hearted, and full of sympathy with the sick and the suffering.’”

Downey. His one request: keep up. It’s a witty city. Everyone in the room with him gets an invitation, the one he paradoxically offers by his compulsively phony, echt-L.A. patter. The nice meta-joke about “blood toxicity” being his problem. Mickey Rourke’s cool electro-whips. Scarlett Johansson: hot little number. Gwyneth: cold little number. That Sam Rockwell is the real deal, folks. We have a future, but not one you’re gonna want to cuddle up with on a chilly night.